For Conservative Movie Lovers: James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, and ‘Aliens’ Part 2

by Leo Grin

Science fiction is a strange genre, liberally blending the past, present, and future into wonderful new forms. It takes a special mind to seamlessly achieve this mixture, to get an audience to truly believe that what they are seeing on the screen, fantastic as it is, is a living, breathing (and, in the case of Aliens, screaming) world. James Cameron is one part cerebral Vulcan scientist and one part wistful artistic hippie, with more than a bit of raging Scottish highlander sprinkled on top. It’s hard to imagine the movie ever coming into being without that curious makeup fueling its creation from first to last.

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Cameron was the oldest child in a Canadian family of five. Born in 1954 and growing up near Niagara Falls, he was just in time to catch the tail end of the atom bomb/Sputnik hysteria and to spend his teen years watching Vietnam play out on the nightly news. “In my youth I was an absolutely rabid science fiction fan,” he says. “I read all the classics, all the old Ace paperback novels. I was really into people like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut. When I read science fiction I saw stuff in my head that I had never seen in films.” He also loved the films of underwater pioneer Jacques Cousteau: “I began to think of the deep ocean as outer space. This was an alien world I could actually reach.”

Dad was a quiet, thoughtful electrical engineer who gave his son a healthy interest in hard science. With his younger brother Mike playing Igor to his Dr. Frankenstein (Mike would himself become an engineer, and later developed some of the equipment his filmmaker brother used to explore the depths of the sea) Cameron regularly engaged in scientific experiments. One day saw them constructing a submersible “out of a mayonnaise jar, an erector set and a paint bucket,” complete with a live mouse as crew, and sending it to the bottom of a river on a rope (the little critter survived). Another time, they had the fire department chasing (and bystanders reporting as a UFO) a hot-air balloon constructed with dry-cleaning bags and lofted into the air by the heat generated by on-board candles.

Mother, on the other hand, was an earthy, passionate, artistic influence. A nurse who spent off hours indulging in serious painting and sketching, she also served in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, revealing her to be a gun-toting tough customer underneath the feminine exterior, just like Sarah Connor in The Terminator and Ripley in Aliens. Under his mother’s tutelage Cameron became an excellent artist in his own right, winning many prizes in local contests.

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But this skill created an inner war with his formidable scientific side, causing no small amount of angst as both disciplines vied for his soul. “There didn’t seem to be any reconciliation possible,” he said later of that time. “You were either in science or you were in the arts. But I was interested in both.” Little did he know then that his drawing, painting, and conceptual skills would be a key ingredient in first fantasizing about and then bringing into existence deeply imagined science-fiction stories like Aliens using the hard technologies of cinema.

Clarity came with his first viewing of a movie so overwhelming that after the lights went up he staggered out of the theater and threw up. “As soon as I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker,” Cameron remembers. “That movie hit me hard on a lot of different levels. Until I saw that film, nothing in my life had ever lived up to my imagination. . . I just couldn’t figure out how [Kubrick] did all that stuff. But I knew I just had to learn.”

When he was sixteen his Dad scored a job in Orange County, California, and their family moved from Canada down to the States. Soon Cameron was married and driving lunch trucks for the local school district, all the while studying special effects at the USC library and fantasizing about how to break into Hollywood. The impetus for making a serious go of it was the thunderous appearance of another science fiction classic. “I walked into Star Wars and just went ‘Wow!’” Cameron says. “Star Wars was what I had been seeing in my head all along. I saw that all the things I had been imagining could now be done.”

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It wasn’t long before he and a couple friends began making their own ambitious 35mm sci-fi movie, Xenogenesis (1978), using seed money acquired from dentists looking to invest in films as a tax shelter. Cameron remembers those days as exhausting but heady. “It was no problem staying up all night, every night for as long as it took. It was that young perspective where you’re willing to sacrifice everything for what you feel is important.”

Unfortunately the dentist money dried up long before principal photography was finished, so Cameron cut what little they had shot into a twelve-minute demo reel. Chock full of models, miniatures, and effects like laser blasts, explosions, and forced perspective cityscapes made out of cardboard, the end result wasn’t 2001 or Star Wars, but it was the beginnings of the style that audiences would later come to embrace in The Terminator and Aliens. “For a bunch of dumbshits who didn’t know what we were doing,” Cameron says, “it was pretty good.”

It was also enough of a résumé to finagle his way onto the effects crew of low-budget producer Roger Corman, where he soon was doing visual effects, set decoration, and art direction for such deathless masterpieces as Battle Beyond the Stars (1980 — Corman’s Star Wars) and Galaxy of Terror (1981 — Corman’s Alien). On the set of the latter film, Cameron first met a struggling actor (and, incidentally, the director of the cult music video “Fish Heads”) named Bill Paxton, and the two would become friendly, something for which lovers of Aliens will always be grateful.

The work was overwhelming and the pay minuscule, but Cameron stuck it out, took on every job he could (often to the chagrin of his less-ambitious co-workers) and began to catch the notice of other low-budget producers looking for people to help get their visions on-screen for pennies on the dollar. “I ran roughshod all over the place,” Cameron says.

It’s a culling process. Some people don’t want to deal with it, the fact that so much relies on personality and not logic. That it’s hype. That it’s the pitch. I knew you had to sell and you had to make your move. . . .

I got a lot of good experience from Roger. What I learned was just ‘Go for it.’ I learned that there was always a way to get it done and make it presentable. Roger’s kind of low-budget mentality teaches you that you can probably get by with a lot less than you think. With Roger, if push comes to shove and there’s a crunch, you can still shoot.

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After contributing to the effects work on Escape from New York, he finally got a chance to direct with Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981). The experience was a disaster, resulting in the fledgling director’s firing a few weeks into the shoot as part of a nefarious plan by the film’s Italian producer to take over the reins himself. Depressed, disheartened, and broke, Cameron fell ill in Rome and spent a feverish night engulfed in a nightmare featuring a robotic monster rising menacingly out of flames. When he awoke, he hurriedly sketched the image before it melted away back into dreamland.

The Terminator had just stalked out of the war-torn future into our world, and the repercussions — both on sci-fi in general and on Cameron’s Aliens — would be incalculable.

Previous posts in the series “James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, and Aliens”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Watch James Cameron’s early demo film Xenogenesis (1978). If you’re someone who’s ever attempted to make a film by yourself, counting on your own ingenuity and long months of work to substitute for a million-dollar budget, you’ll understand how impressive this short film remains even today. A bigger budget only gets you so far, and Aliens could never have been made without the sort of cheap, scrappy techniques demonstrated in this movie.


YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen


YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen


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Posted Aug 28th 2010 at 7:03 am in Featured Story, For Conservative Movie Lovers | 42 Comments